Proclaimer Blog
Why evangelicals may have got quiet times completely wrong
It's the standard evangelical application; worthy if a little predictable – read your Bible more; pray more. But what if we've got those two essential ingredients of our quiet times wrong? Tipped off by my pastor I've been thinking about the puritan view of personal devotions and, interestingly, they had three elements, not two. This is best explained by Richard Baxter in the Saints Everlasting Rest. He said that we have to have three ingredients:
- consideration – what we would call reading/understanding the text
- soliloquy – more of this in a moment
- prayer
The soliloquy is the "talking to yourself" part and the Puritans saw this as a key component of quiet times. The Bible exhorts us to meditate on God's word again and again and the Hebrew word means to chew over – to digest, if you like. How much of this do we actually do? How much of a discipline is it? No wonder our quiet times are sometimes turgid and difficult. We're quite possibly missing a piece of the puzzle.
Interestingly, last week I was reading Eric Mataxas' bio of Bonhoeffer and noticed that when he set up his Confessing Church college he got his students to find a quiet place each day for one whole hour and chew over a small part of Scripture; to talk to themselves about it; to work it through in their minds over and over again; to let it sink into every fibre of their being. These students, coming from largely mechanical-Christianity backgrounds, hated it! But we, we believers should love it.
And we need it. There is something profoundly wrong with a quiet time that reads/understands and prays without the soliloguy. We need to take the word of God into us and let it transform us. As Baxter puts it, we all need to find our Isaac place (somewhere away from the bustle of the day) and, basically, chew on God's word, preaching to ourselves.
A not-so-quiet time…